An old or well-known series (particularly science fiction) has a famous signature villain that the fanbase loves.

The hero beats said villain(s) in their traditional form several times.

The writers become worried that fans will get bored with the villains unless they give said villains new strategies, or new forms of attack to use against the hero.

As a result, a steadily larger amount of knowledge about the villains becomes accumulated, which violates the Nothing Is Scarier rule. Villains are much more intimidating if we hardly know anything about them, and they come across as just being single-minded forces of nature with no real motivation other than to destroy things for the sake of it. Once writers start psychoanalyzing them and giving them definite reasons for what they do, they lose their menace.

Villains who have gone through this process usually have three possible outcomes.

They can begin the transition to Anti-Hero or Villain Protagonist, as did Warcraft's Orcs, and Star Trek's Borg ultimately did in isolated examples.

Note that Villain Decay is almost never caused by a lack of Offscreen Villain Dark Matter, a difficulty in recruiting Mooks, or even injuries from battle with the heroes — which is to say, they don't become worse off because they have lost. Also note that a Villainous Breakdown is not a guarantee of Villain Decay. Decay will only happen quicker if their entire Villain Pedigree is replaced. If you have an Invincible Hero - especially one who shouldn't be capable of winning but somehow always wins anyway – Villain Decay is almost assured, even for characters who haven't fought yet. Tends to be particularly hard to avoid for villains who manage to survive the heroes' climb up the Sorting Algorithm of Evil.

Contrast Villain Sue, Invincible Villain, and Only the Author Can Save Them Now, where a villain is too effective or scary. Believe it or not, those tropes suck the tension out of the villains even worse than this one. Also contrast Adaptational Villainy, where a relatively non-villainous character in a work becomes dramatically more villainous in an adaptation, and Villain Forgot to Level Grind, where the villain never becomes any less formidable, but the hero becomes so much more powerful over time that a once threatening villain is no longer a problem.

Examples:

In a stunning and awesome inversion, Dungeon Keeper Ami features Mukrezar. Mukrezar is, and was, a Keeper of dubious competence, given to many Zany schemes (usually involving a Ring of Power). However, since his resurrection he has shown such an assessment is significantly lacking. Apparently his resourcefulness, ability to bounce back from crushing defeat, and, most importantly, willingness to take incredible chances- and then turn them into victories even if they failed -was his greatest asset. Every appearance has only increased the estimation of his threat, despite being Plucky Comic Relief.

Discord, god of chaos and in general considered one of the best characters in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, is reduced to a brainwashed monster henchman of Big Bad Titan near the end of the story and loses his reality warping abilities. To add insult to injury, he gets Killed Off for Real by Celestia.

Young Justice: Darkness Falls: Depending on what you might think about The Light, you could say they underwent a form of this, since a lot of their subtle manipulations, small progresses and the like gets thrown out with what seems like Vandal Savage's nest egg plan to use Darkseid as HIS endgame. And then when Luthor cuts off the Light's legs by giving the league information about their operations, the Light essentially goes into hibernation for the most part, with any plans they have either done in public by Luthor or done by brute force. But even then, Klarion wasn't working for the light that time.

Sonic X: Dark Chaos does this badly with the Metarex. In the canon Sonic X, the Metarex were a nearly unstoppable empire of powerful robots led by even more-powerful robot overlords that gave Super Sonic a run for his money. Dark Chaos reduces them to a side faction... and by the halfway point of the story, their armies are all but destroyed and their leaders have gone into hiding (with a collective Villainous Breakdown for good measure). It doesn't help that their motivations are also completely different from the canon; in the show, they wanted to exterminate all animal life in the galaxy and replace it with plant life. In Dark Chaos, they're just trying to find a way to kill Tsali and revive their species by any means necessary.

Prince Charming, already a fairly ineffectual villain in the Shrek movies, gets decayed further to a minor protagonist in the Shrek pinball game.

Radio

Spoofed in Nebulous where K.E.N.T. mention battling "the Seaquel Devils" (a play on the Doctor Who monster the Sea Devils) - "They came back again. And again. Each time less effective than the last." Harry then reminds them of the Prequeloids - "We always knew how they did that!"

Tabletop Games

Whenever a new army in Warhammer 40,000 is introduced, they start as existential threats to the entire setting for a year or two and then decay into just another faction.

There's an obvious reason for this: profit. Make your new faction unstoppable arse-kickers who make mincemeat out of any opposition, and you've got a surefire way of getting eternal 13-year-old boys everywhere forking out on them just so that they can be the toughest tabletop warrior. Then throw out some heroic last stands for the Space Marines so that the existing factions don't get completely alienated. Wait a few years till everybody's got them, introduce a new, even more powerful, even more expensive faction. Rinse and repeat. Profit.

The Orks started off as a galaxy wide tide of death and destruction but degenerated into pub brawlers over time.

Zigzagged with the Orks. No one in the setting, and very few outside of it, will argue that Ork hordes aren't a serious, ongoing threat to everyone else. The problem is, Orks have kinda been stuck in the status quo area for a while, and the big videogames featuring them have them on the bottom of the Villain Pedigree.

Tyranids also started off as unstoppable, galaxy-devouring horde of alien locusts, but their impending, full-scale invasion and eating of the galaxy kept getting delayed and delayed and then the tyranids inexplicably adopted an "attack in small numbers" strategy that made them less of a threat to the setting.

Then on a smaller scale you have some of the lords of Chaos. Abbadon the Despoiler is probably the number one offender. He is supposedly the heir to Horus and carries the title of Warmaster of Chaos, as well as the favor of all four Chaos Gods. However his Black Crusades seem to end in defeat more often than not, or at best as a stalemate. One can argue on whether or not it's his fault but the community at large now looks at him as a bit of a joke, earning him the nickname Failbaddon.

Games Workshop has spent the better part of 2013 trying their hardest to dispel this notion about Abaddon, eventually resorting to retconning eleven of his thirteen Black Crusades.

During the Gathering Storm events, Asdrubael Vect, effective leader of the Dark Eldar, got hit pretty hard with this in one fell swoop, both in-universe and outside. An incident he couldn't have foreseen (Ynnead destructively picking an avatar) caused a giant cataclysm inside Commorragh that he had expected, yet the plans he had to stop it failed, he panicked in front of everyone (which severely undermined his reputation), and whatever improvisations he could come up with weren't enough to keep the situation under control, with other groups he didn't even have a hand in being the ones to save the day. As such, his plans were all shredded to nothing, there is active plotting to overthrow him (which used to be unthinkable), several of his loyal underlings ran off to join the new faction this spawned, and the moment he tried to say this was All According to Plan everyone smelled the bullshit from the start, ending his Consummate Liar streak. As a result, within Commorragh his reputation has basically inverted and his survival is uncertain, and to the fanbase he now just looks like a goon that will probably get cut down, his millennia of Magnificent Bastardry now lost in a deluge of unexpected plan-wrecking spanners.

Theatre

King George in Hamilton steadily loses poise as the British influence on the plot diminishes, first, at the start of the war, barely moving, singing at the audience in full regalia, then after Yorktown considerably more animated, and in the second act much more animated and more casually dressed, culminating in him joining in with the populace and throwing papers in Hamilton's face in "The Reynolds Pamphlet."

Blood Boy, a big antagonist in the early stages of Survival of the Fittest version 3 had this occur in the last topic he appeared in, becoming an almost Jokeresque figure (to the point of almost directly quoting from The Dark Knight at one point). This does, however, have a fairly good reason: a different handler took over the character for that scene, one who, needless to say, had a rather different take on the character.

The Necromancer, in the Whateley Universe. Starts out as one of the top 60 supervillains on the Interpol rating scale. He's now oh-for-two against Team Kimba, who are high schoolers. Even with his team of supervillains working for him. Now one-for-two, making out like a bandit in the process, excluding one goal failing due to a Unknown Unknown.

On TWGTG, we have the Mad Scientist Dr. Insano that first appeared on The Spoony Experiment, whose early appearances depict him as a Laughably Evil, but none the less dangerous character. Later appearances, however, have him attempting no evil plans and just have him acting comedic.

The suave, chessmaster-like, psychotic Ask That Guy is slowly turning into a pathetic, needy, emotional wreck. Maybe played with because he's always been like that, he just can't seem to hide it anymore.

In his first appearance during the Nostalgia Critic's review of The Last Airbender, Shamalayan removed Critic's talent (he gets it back, even though "there wasn't much to lose"), and would have done it again in Devil if he hadn't been stopped by the actual Devil. Come After Earth, and he's become so predictable that Critic isn't even phased by him anymore. Heck, he even helps Critic out with his review of Pixels by making Peter Dinklage unfunny (a Reverse Shamalayan).

Strong Bad, from the infamous Homestar Runner universe, used to try to do actually evil things, but he's gone under lots of Villain Decay. To quote him from the Strong Bad Email(sbemail) called "your edge"

Strong Bad: Me and the Cheat, walked past this deflated basketball and consciously decided not to re-inflate it! And we feathered Strong Sad for a HALF HOUR!

In Noob, Dark Avenger is one of the most feared player killers of the game... except a Running Gag has Sparadrap accidentally killing him. He's shown to give other characters difficulty, but it made the decay slower rather than keeping it from happening. Writing Dark Avenger out of the series due to his actor moving away relied on having that decay reach the lowest point possible.

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